They tell us to make our online banking access more secure, but remembering yet another password is forever becoming a more and more tricky business.

Personally, I prefer to use software as a password manager. An Excel spreadsheet is one solution, but it’s not a very good one.

I have been using Password Safe. But call me shallow, but I didn’t get along with the look of it. It did, though, do everything I wanted – an ability to save my encrypted passwords onto a removable drive (so I can use it at work and home), being able to categorise my passwords into distinct groups and the ability to generate strong random passwords (you may as well make them tough if something like this is going to go to the trouble of remembering it for you).

Today I’ve come across an alternative and it’s a cracker – KeePass. It even let me port password from Password Safe into it (although I had to downgrade my copy of Password Safe from 3.02 to 2.16 before I could do this).

What both have in common is that they’re open source and totally free. You can’t argue with that.

As an IT geek it’s my duty, I feel, to drink coffee and to do so from anything other than your standard porcelain mug.

So, I use a one-cup Cafetiere. It’s plastic so looks and feels naff but I’ve convinced at least 2 people at work to buy them, and many others are envious of the coffee aromas drifting from my desk. It quite literally is a proper cafetiere – you fill it with “proper” ground coffee, leave hot water swishing about inside it for 10 minutes and then press the plunger.

The only problem I’ve found, long term, is the rubber seal around the outside of the “plunger” wearing after a while – coffee grounds then start to seep through into the coffee. At this point it’s time to buy another!

And a bargain at only £5, from Cookware Online, amongst other places. You know you want one.

Summary of One Cup Cafetiere

It’s plastic and doesn’t look particularly pretty, but it makes a damn decent cup of coffee for £5

Reviewed by David Artiss on 26th September 2006.

Now, I don’t have Sky but I have in the past and I understand why it’s so popular. In particular Sky+, which provides recording to a hard drive.

If you’re lucky enough to have the latter and regularly fill up the hard drive that’s in it, apart from needing to get a life, you’ll probably also be thinking of upgrading it. Yes, you can do this yourself, although it does invalidate the year long warrantee that Sky provide on their boxes.

Anyway, assuming you do want to do this, and assuming you’re the kind of person who does have stupid numbers of recording on their hard drive (and hence need to upgrade), you’re also unlikely to ever get to the point where you have nothing left on your existing hard drive left to watch. So taking the old one out and plugging in a new, blank, one probably doesn’t appeal.

Step forward Stuart McConnachie – friend and work colleague. He’s written a piece of software, named Copy+, which will copy an existing Sky hard drive to a new one. You just need to be able to plug both into a PC, so the software can “do it’s thang”. Oh, and it’s FREE.

He started a website for it, but web development not being his area of expertise, it wasn’t, erm, very good. So, wanting to build up my own portfolio of websites, I volunteered. Designed and hosted by my good self (but content by Stuart), the site provides all the information you could ask for on the software and how to use it.

So, if you’re in a position of needing to update your Sky HD, then the site is will recommended.